@northernnarwhal A DDoS only prevents a machine from communicating with the outside world. It doesn't give any access to the machine itself. The likely cause was "someone hates us/bronies and wants the site to die"

@redenchilada You probably could get a poorly configured server to leak data with a DDoS. If PHP or MySQL dies and starts spewing error messages into the browser, for instance. A DDoS could also be used to guarantee the servers RAM was full/flushed for something like Heartbleed to work properly.